Shrumen Lumen

The Outcome

The geometry of the mushrooms is based on the folding pattern of and origami  "magic ball". The beauty of that structure is its ability to expand and contract; the challenge is that it's much harder to control and as we found out later, much harder to fold at scale.

We jumped straight into prototyping, and planned to use the same method we had used to build the flowers: route the patterns in corrugated plastic, fold them so that they would " memorize" the fold lines, unfold them, then weld them together. But where at a previous project Blumen Lumen on 2014, each flower was made of only by two 10' x 5' pieces, where as the mushrooms heads were made of 12 pieces. This was also the first time we ever worked on at this scale with this complex origami pattern.